stopped and turned in his tracks. Mawson
saw his look of alarm. He turned and looked
back. The featureless plateau of snow and ice
stretched into the distance, marked only by the
tracks Mawson’s sledge had left. Where was the
other sledge?
Mawson rushed on foot back along the
tracks. Suddenly he came to the edge of a gap-
ing hole in the surface, 11 feet wide. On the
far side, two separate sledge tracks led up to
the hole; on the near side, only one led away.
It was December 14, 1912. Thirty years old,
already a seasoned explorer, Douglas Mawson
was the leader of the Australasian Antarctic Ex-
pedition (AAE), a 31-man team pursuing the
most ambitious exploration yet of the southern
continent. Let Scott and Amundsen race for the
South Pole. Mawson was determined to discov-
er everything he could about a 2,000-mile-long
swath of Antarctica that was terra incog-
nita, and to wring from it the best scientific
results—in terms of geology, meteorology,
magnetism, biology, atmospheric science, and
glaciology—ever obtained on a polar journey.
Having built a hut on the shore of a cove they
named Commonwealth Bay, the men of the
AAE had wintered over in what was later proven
to be the windiest place on Earth (at least at sea
level), with gusts up to 200 mph. At times, the
gales were so strong they knocked the men off
their feet and sent them sliding across the ice.
Setting out in November 1912, Mawson’s
sledging party was one of eight three-man
teams sent off on journeys in all possible di-
rections. For his own Far Eastern Party, he
chose 29-year-old Swiss ski champion Xavier
Mertz and 25-year-old Belgrave Ninnis, an ea-
ger, likeable Englishman serving in the Royal
Fusiliers. Hoping to connect the unmapped in-
terior with the heights of far-off Oates Land,
discovered by Robert Falcon Scott’s party only
the year before, Mawson was bent on making
the deepest push of all into the unknown.
By the morning of December 14, 35 days
out, the trio had reached a point nearly 300
miles from the hut. The men had crossed two
major glaciers and scores of hidden crevasses—
deep fissures in the ice camouflaged by thin
snowbridges. Just after noon that day, Mertz
had held up his ski pole, signaling yet another
crevasse. Mawson judged it to be only a minor
nuisance, as his sledge glided smoothly across
the bridge. He called out the usual warning to
Ninnis, and, in a last glance back, saw that his
teammate had corrected his path to cross the
crevasse head-on rather than diagonally.
Now Mawson and Mertz cut away the fragile
By David Roberts
Photographs by Frank Hurley
Mawson heard the faint whine of a
dog behind him. It must be, he thought,
one of the six huskies pulling the rear
sledge. But then Mertz, who had been
scouting ahead on skis all morning,
David Roberts is the author of Alone on the Ice, a
new book on Mawson’s survival trek. Frank Hurley,
who died in 1962, was 26 when he joined the AAE.
download one of our digital editions to watch rare
footage of the expedition in Antarctica.